Study Finds High Temperatures Killing Large Parts Of Great Barrier Reef

Next we have news of the way that warming oceans are affecting coral reefs. It's not good news.

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Warmer waters stress the coral, sapping it of color and sometimes killing it.

MIA HOOGENBOOM: It's confronting to go from a picture of a reef which is colorful, which is swarming with life, to a reef that's covered in dead corals and corals that are covered in a slimy, green algae.

INSKEEP: Mia Hoogenboom talked with us via Skype about a study she co-authored on the bleaching of reefs off Australia.

HOOGENBOOM: So it doesn't feel like the same reef. And it doesn't engender that same sense of wonder at the biodiversity that's present in those areas.

INSKEEP: Hoogenboom was part of a team that went diving to look at the reefs.

MARTIN: They found huge sections of the Great Barrier Reef dead. In the northern third of the reef, the vast majority of the coral was bleached or dead.

INSKEEP: It's a disaster for wildlife and for tourism and part of what the paper calls a global-scale event.

HOOGENBOOM: We know from our results in the current paper that we can predict which reef's bleached the worst based mostly on temperature of the water at that time.

MARTIN: And with warming oceans because of climate change, things aren't looking good for reefs. Some scientists guessed that the reefs would gain resilience to warmer water.

HOOGENBOOM: But actually, we didn't find any evidence of that at all. So past exposure to bleaching didn't mean that reefs were less likely to bleach in 2016.

INSKEEP: That's what Mia Hoogenboom saw while exploring the Great Barrier Reef. That study is out today in the journal Nature.